The chairman of an online-tutoring startup connecting Indian graduates to Western schoolchildren by VoIP says he is not engaged in outsourcing education.
"This is about how you can get what is available to the rich, available to the common man," Krishnan Ganesh told the Guardian yesterday.
Ganesh's service, Tutorvista, …

COMMENTS

Buying back the empty bottle of whisky you've lended ...

"This may not be so much a case of outsourcing education to India, as buying back in expertise which we have mostly lost."

Possibly. However, being an ex expert in super-computing, thus exposed to maths and physics, and having found myself in a company where half of my colleagues are from India, I can tell you maths have vanished from the indian education scheme most likely 1 generation back !

This has apparently been done in order to build technology awareness (ya know, windows, next, next behaviour :-).

Dunno about the Brits (my record is pretty good on that) but you might just get an empty bottle, after this buy back ...

Maths education is at a very high level in India

Maths education in India is at a very high level. All 17 year olds in education are taken to the equivalent of 1st year university level of the UK - Lagrangian multipliers, matrix algebra, advanced calculus, advanced statistics and econometrics.

It may be the case that at the expert supercomputer level the skills are lacking. However, most middle-class parents want their children to do well in exams up to A-Level standard, and such needs would almost certainly be met and exceeded by Indian tutors. There's no shortage of mathematicians in India that can teach at these levels.

But you may still wish to heed the advice of the supercomputer expert above. After all, £50 is waaaaay too much to spend on a child's mathematics education, even on a trial basis.

And who needs maths anyway? We've got calculators and (super) computers now. Don't worry that all the Chinese, Indian and Jewish kids in class may laugh at the thicky tw@t. That's character-building, and low self-esteem is a good thing in teenage years. And by the time the young fella gets on to his Media Studies course, he'll understand all the maths he needs - eighths, quarters, maybe even the metric system.